This is a blog to discuss philosophy, chess, politics,
C. S. Lewis, or whatever it is that I'm in the mood to discuss.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

The View from Nowhere

In
his book “The View from Nowhere,” Nagel says that we need an explanation of the
possibility of objective knowledge that is itself an instance of objective
knowledge. How could we have the capacity to know the world through, say,
science and mathematics? Natural selection, he says, only explains how
creatures with vision or reason will survive, not how vision or reasoning are
possible. Natural selection at best says that if we attempt to know the world
and we get it wrong, we die without passing on our genes. Thus someone who went
up in a moon rocket and ended up floating through space without a food supply
would die as a result, and natural selection would select against them. But we
seem to have capacities of thought that don’t seem in any way obviously useful
for, say, humans in the hunter-gatherer stage. He mentions the general response
on behalf of a natural-selection explanation. According to this response, not
every feature of an organism has to be separately selected for its adaptive
value, and some features can be side effects of others. The large brain that
was useful for making tools also gave us the capacity to develop the theory of
relativity and prove Godel’s theorem. He thinks there is little or nothing in
the way of evidence for this story. However, it is accepted because it is the
only candidate for a Darwinian explanation of our reasoning capacities. But
rather than adopt a “Darwin or bust” explanation, or a creationist one, he
simply says that he has no explanation for this.

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About Me

I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.